Resilience. Efficiency. Two words that would absolutely be at home in my “Tricksy Words” article. They sound so noble. Like two shining ideals every organization should obviously pursue. Yet, no matter how many variations I see across companies, industries, and cultures, these two ideas almost always end up in some sort of conflict.

Why? Because they are inherently in tension. And sometimes that tension snaps.

As Brian Klaas of University College London recently put it so perfectly on The Hidden Brain podcast:

“Because if you are optimized and absolutely efficient to the limit, the system or your life becomes brittle. It becomes one where there’s no give. So when something inevitably goes wrong, as it always does, there’s no ability to absorb it.”

Brian illustrated this point by talking about how the most efficient schedule fails to leave time for unexpected traffic and that perfectly illustrates the challenge at an individual level but the same concept scales up to teams and even companies. If you’ve ever been part of a team approaching a deadline and thought, “no one can get sick or everything falls apart”, you have experienced exactly what he’s talking about.

Of course, it gets trickier. When an organization, or system, fails to find the balance between efficiency and resilience, you end up with a structural conflict that can masquerade as interpersonal drama.

I like to use the Harrison-Short-Scherer Waterline Model to help understand what I mean by this type of “masquerading” conflict. The model basically says that disagreements “above the waterline” may seem to be fairly straightforward but are often driven by deeper, submerged issues. My default example here is the decision whether to enable 2-factor authentication for a system. Chances are good that the person speaking for “security” is in favor and the person speaking for “usability” is against. Sometimes they will agree because the organization clearly values one over the other but more often there needs to be a tie-breaker because 2-factor authentication is typically more secure while being inherently annoying. For everyone around the discussion, it may seem as though each person is obstinately sticking to their pet opinion but the reality is that to do their jobs properly, these two individuals must be at odds and someone else must break the tie. This is a structural issue masquerading as a group or interpersonal issue.

Once upon a time, I even found myself in a situation like this where the battle was completely internal! I was wearing both an efficiency hat and a safety hat at the time and would constantly contradict myself. The situation only improved when I was able to separate out the roles from each other and consciously note which “voice” I was using at any given moment.  

So what does all this have to do with efficiency and resilience? Much like security and usability, these concepts are often at odds. It is the age-old challenge faced by organizations, and individuals, who are deeply committed to efficiency but can’t shake the gnawing sense that maybe they should also be leaving a little wiggle room… just in case.

So What Does “Efficiency” Mean Anyway?

Efficiency is the art of trimming slack to the bone. Elegant. Ruthless. Unsparing.

Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I tend to think in terms of margins of error and factors of safety. A building, or airplane, built without either is likely to be the most efficient to build but with the tiniest crack or unexpected load… Boom.

In an organizational context, efficiency usually means a team that is staffed just right for the current workload. Everything hums along perfectly until someone calls in sick, a critical piece of work shows up late on a Friday afternoon, or the client “just has a few quick changes” (spoiler: they are never quick). 

The temptation to chase maximum efficiency is understandable. Who doesn’t want to look like a lean, mean, productive machine? Plus, many small businesses operate in this mode out of pure necessity. Sometimes the budget to operate in anything other than maximum efficiency simply doesn’t exist. But when you squeeze every ounce of buffer out of a system, you also squeeze out the capacity to adapt, absorb, and bounce back.

Now, Let’s Talk About Resilience

Resilience is the ability to bounce back. It is flexibility under pressure. It’s the kid on the playground who takes a spill off the play structure, stands up, dusts off, and goes right back to climbing.

This is where the margins for error and factors of safety come into play. When an airplane wing can bend nearly far enough to touch tips with its opposite, the minor bumps and fluctuations of even a fairly turbulent flight are easily weathered. But if we dive too deeply and insist that every individual material be maximally resilient, you will find yourself working only with materials that bend under pressure and then spring back. That might be great if you’re designing a bouncy ball but it will be less great if you are building a skyscraper.

For those companies lucky enough to think about resilience in their staffing, a resilient team has “space” for the unexpected. They can cover when someone is out or adjust to changing priorities without immediately pushing everyone else to the verge of burnout. But this approach can often feel “overstaffed” relative to what looks efficient on paper. In an efficiency-obsessed world, that can look, well, suspicious. Wasteful, even.

Resilience often demands what efficiency trims away: slack. And slack, when judged by efficiency metrics alone, looks like fat that needs cutting.

So… Which One is Better?

If we chase resilience too far, we end up like silly putty. Paper-thin, wiggly, and not very strong. If you try too hard to “always be ready for anything,” you might lose the structure and stability that make daily work effective. Just as silly putty cannot hold its shape for long and eventually slumps back down into a puddle, an organization with no bones can’t hold a clear direction even if it seems stable for the first few seconds.

At the same time, maximizing efficiency risks being all bones with no muscle or connective tissue. If the bones are fused together in the most perfect alignment, the skeleton cannot move. We need the tendons to leave a little space or the joints cannot flex.

One of my favorite clients has spent years building her business to the point where it can sustain slightly more headcount than is needed for pure survival. Her team has finally gone from constantly hovering at (or over) the line of burnout. This was a consciously pursued goal and she knows that having gotten there is a huge victory. And she still struggles regularly to appreciate the upsides when the business has a slow month and it is time to balance the books.

Sometimes, there is no perfect answer. The closest we can get is making intentional tradeoffs: choosing where we will be ruthlessly efficient and where we will build in resilience. Knowing that every decision has a cost, and that every system needs a little bit of give somewhere.

Balance is a Teeter Totter

In the end, balance isn’t about achieving a static, perfect state. It’s dynamic. It’s like a teeter-totter (or see-saw, depending on your regional dialect).

If you’ve ever been on a teeter-totter, you have probably tried to find that beautiful point where everyone is hovering off the ground. You may have even spent a few, glorious moments in that fleeting equilibrium. But perfect, persistent, unmoving balance is rare, to say the least. Often, the best you can hope for is that two people, working together with a little attention and a little give, can find a happy rhythm. Maybe they can even keep their feet off the ground with only minimal deviations to one side or the other, quickly corrected back to center with tiny shifts of weight. That’s pretty much the dream.

Organizations are no different. Balancing resilience and efficiency isn’t a “set it and forget it” achievement. It’s an ongoing, delicate dance. When you acknowledge the tradeoffs, or simply the fact that such tradeoffs exist at all, you can make better, more intentional choices about when to lean into efficiency and when to invest in resilience.

And maybe, just maybe, your teeter-totter will spend more time close to level… and less time crashing hard to one side.